It’s funny how the promise of open source is an unreachable ideal.<\/p>\n
Let’s take a popular open source project: Thunderbird.<\/p>\n
Gosh, it would be nice to make a few changes to it.<\/p>\n
But it’s too big. And, as a guess, you’d need to spend a lot of time (and perhaps money) setting up a development environment to actually work on it.<\/p>\n
In an imaginary, ideal world, such a program would be made up of many clearly labeled, independent, smaller parts with clear, decoupling APIs between them.<\/p>\n
Yes, there would always be a bucket of shared library, “memcpy” kinds of things. But those things should just be there in an opaque monolith, always available, never obtrusive.<\/p>\n
And, in that ideal world, the pieces of the program would be written in a modern language (i.e. not C\/C++).<\/p>\n
Telling experience: A few years ago, I needed the Perl POP3 module to do something. Since the source was part of Perl, I simply modified it, sent the author\/owner (whose contact information was at the top of the source file) the change and moved on. Soon thereafter, I noticed he had imported the change in a better, more general way. That was all good and pleasant. That the program ran directly from the source was the enabling factor there.<\/p>\n
I wonder how much FireFox and Thunderbird would be improved if there were a Tools|Advanced button to toggle the UI\/Javascript source between the .jar file format it’s in and a fully expanded form. … And much more of the program were moved up to Javascript from C++. … Or if writing extensions weren’t so chaotic a process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s funny how the promise of open source is an unreachable ideal. Let’s take a popular open source project: Thunderbird. Gosh, it would be nice to make a few changes to it. But it’s too big. And, as a guess, … Continue reading